As a developmental psychologist (among other things) I believe that learning is situated in a particular context. In the best of all (learning) worlds that context would have a commitment to learning together. In a community of learners we can take on a variety of roles depending on the tasks and purposes we are working with or toward. We can be learners, co-learners, teachers and co-teachers. We can help one another to collect, clarify, organize, criticize, imagine and reflect on the ongoing learning. We can offer one another suggestions, feedback, support (scaffolding), and sharing a workload. I’d like to call this collaborative learning. So we will look at the relationship between collaborative learning and metacognition.
Collaborative learning has both a long and a current “history.”
Cooperative Learning
See, for example the work of Johnson and Johnson in 1975. See, for example : https://www.teachervision.com/pro-dev/cooperative-learning/48531.html
Social Practice/Situated Learning
Situated learning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXOQ9rXzL_8 Cartoon like
Barbara Rogoff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdh_GjBsphg
Pitching In: Learning as a Collaborative Process (1 hr. 20 min video)
Maryann Griffin: 14 minute “lecture” video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fPeoGamcLU Ph.D.
Etienne Wenger, Community of Practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn3joQSQm4o ***
1 hour + (apprenticeship) (1980s) community/relationship btw expert and apprentice vs apprentice to apprentice (expert too busy) call that a community
Communities of Practice in Higher Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrR1MSaXlLI
Rogoff check out http://languageandliteracytheoryandpractice.wikispaces.com/SOCIOCULTURAL-HISTORICAL+THEORY
Learning Organizations
And even in the adult world of learning, business learning, for example, we have the example of “The Learning Organization” formulated by Peter Senge of MIT in 1990. In the Fifth Discipline he listed the “5 disciplines “ that are the core of learning organization work. Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, Team Learning, and Systems Thinking. Following the original Text and a second one, “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook,” 1994, Segne and his team authored Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares about Education, in 2000. In that text, the authors say:
The idea of a school that can learn has become increasingly prominent during the last few years. It is becoming clear that schools can be re-created, made vial, and sustainably renewed not by fiat or command, and not by regulations, but by taking a learning orientation. This means involving everyone in the system in expressing their aspirations, building their awareness, and developing their capabilities together. In a school that learns, people who traditionally may have been suspicious of one another—parents and teachers, educators and local business people, administrators and union members, people inside and outside the school walls, students and adults—recognize their common stake in the future of the school system and the things they can learn from one another.” (p. 5)
More recently, we have the work of David Perkins: King Arthur’s Round Table: How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organization (2003).
Disciplined Based Learning Communities
Each discipline (science, history, mathematics, technology, art, etc.,) has its own way of learning. But each member of these communities does not learn alone. I want to reference here the science community (disciple) as seen in the eyes of elementary school children and reported by Karen Gallas in Talking Their Way Into Science: Hearing Children’s Questions and Theories, Responding with Curricula, (1995), Teachers College Press.
….It seems sad that this notion of not being “good at science” lives on for many children today (and for their teachers), because after collecting data on science talk for 5 years I haven’t yet met a child (or an adult) was unable to think and talk like a scientist…
Since 1989 I have audiotaped discussion with heterogeneously grouped classrooms where the science curriculum is taught by classroom teachers, and not by a specialist. I have collected data primarily from first and second grade children, but I also have participated in talks in third and fifth grade classroom and have had numerous discussions with teachers from a variety of setting who have begun to work with this kind of science talk….” (p. 3)
What will resonate, I think, are the children’s voices: the tremendous potential for complex thinking that they embody when spaces are made for them to act in concert, and the ways in which their voices make us long to go back and be prodded to think and image as children once again. (p. 4)
There is also work by Gordon Wells and Gen Ling Chang-Wells on Constructing Knowledge Together: Classrooms as Center of Inquiry and Literacy, 1992, Heinemann.
Finally, I will mention Communities of Practice; and, to get a start, offer a link:
http://wenger-trayner.com/theory/
Communities of practice
A brief introduction
Etienne Wenger-Trayner
The term “community of practice” is of relatively recent coinage, even though the phenomenon it refers to is age-old. The concept has turned out to provide a useful perspective on knowing and learning. A growing number of people and organizations in various sectors are now focusing on communities of practice as a key to improving their performance .This brief and general introduction examines what communities of practice are and why researchers and practitioners in so many different contexts find them useful as an approach to knowing and learning.
So, beginning in elementary school, if not before, and following through high school and college and into the work force, collaboration becomes a center piece of learning. As I review the collaborative learning idea though a variety of frameworks and resources, my intent is to show the relationship between collaborative learning and metacognition. I hope to address the ways in which collaboration helps leaners to become more aware of and in control of their learning: i. e., become metacognitive.
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